How to display many links without looking like a Parked Page

The nature of our site has us displaying a lot of links. Think of us as a search engine that searches for you.

The problem is that since we're not famous . . . yet, when people hit our page, we look like a link farm or landing page. We've been trying lots of things to get a first design that looks good, but still no success.

Reddit, hacker news, google, pretty much look similar or worse, but they have brand name recognition.

Any ideas? Any sites that have similar problems, but look good? Digg is the one we're thinking of right now.

I think the main reason the sites you mentioned work, is because they let people interact around those links, rather than just click them.

If you look at some of the buzz surrounding Digg right now, you'll notice that the mass exodus Digg has been going through was triggered mainly by Digg dropping some of the functionality that let users interact around the posted links.